ABSTRACT
The distinction between ‘serious music, music for living by and music for leisure’1 was of fundamental importance to the counter-culture and highlights the way in which social reality and musical experience fused into a collective experience. While 1967 focused ‘love’ as a weapon with revolutionary potential, the overt sexuality and underlying violence in performance and musical style associated with such performers as Jimi Hendrix, the Stones, the Doors, Love and MC5 initially seem at variance with a movement committed to peace and love. Further, whilst it might be argued that on stage the groups’ sexual aggression was little more than formalised and ritualised violence, the music nevertheless has a neurotic element which, in its more frenzied form, evokes a pseudo-tribal paranoia. ‘Rob Tyner, the MC5 lead singer, sprints on stage, leaps high in the air, his body writhing through the strobes: then as he hits ground: KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKERS!’2 There was, then, an obverse side to the notion of love more consonant with the ‘hedonism and selfgratification’, ‘social irreverence and an interest in experimental ways of life’, of certain groups within the counter-culture.
